Toronto allowed Sidewalk Labs soil to be poisoned
The rolling up of Sidewalk Labs is a sign of our times — so many problems rolled into one.
The panic of a pandemic. Paranoia about privacy.
Private profit versus public planning. A public-private partnership that lacked transparency and lost the public’s trust.
The public interest — and resistance — reasserted itself, creating a hostile environment that endured. The already contaminated waterfront soil seemed poisoned beyond remediation or mediation.
Little wonder Sidewalk Labs decided to walk.
Its ownership at Alphabet has much to answer for — the bait-and-switch land grab that tried to leverage five hectares into 77, and its unabashed ambition to hoard unlimited data without limitations. But there are also important questions for ourselves about how we let Google get away from us.
Say what you will about the hubris of the corporate parent. Google has given birth to peerless infotech and innovation that could have boosted Toronto’s global brand, so this is a missed growth opportunity.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of Sidewalk Labs. So much static from both sides — thousands of pages of hype and counter-hype, years of shiftiness and shouting, corporate agendas versus political agendas (even private vendettas).
That’s ancient history now. Today, in mid-pandemic, a parcel of land dubbed Quayside — the unadorned crown jewel of the waterfront — has been abandoned, but we are not without alternatives.
Toronto gets to do a do-over.
Better luck next time, but best we learn lessons from last time.
The chorus of criticisms was based on a discordant coalition of opponents — from surveillance capitalism vigilantes to urban planning purists. They often raised valid points, but also tried to score political points.
Don’t blame critics for the collapse — ultimately, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs came to terms. But the ground shifted — not just the COVID-19 climate, but big management changes on both sides (a new premier at Queen’s Park, who installed a new board chair at Waterfront Toronto; a new CEO at Alphabet less interested in risky real estate ventures).
But when investors look at risk, they look at realities. Much of Toronto turned against Sidewalk Labs, and so its smart-city ambitions may be an easier sell in uncritical cities desperate for investment.
Critics were right that Sidewalk Labs overstepped in trying to amass data and expand its waterfront footprint. But in their zeal to paint the parent company as an evil empire (Google long ago dropped its “Don’t be evil” motto), the critics also overreached and overhyped.
Opponents were quick to weaponize privacy questions, raising exaggerated fears of corporate intrusions into the daily lives of residents. But metadata doesn’t individualize information, it tells us about broad traffic and usage patterns — not unlike those oldfashioned cables that the roads department places near stop signs to count the number of cars using an intersection.
There were legitimate questions about who owned the metadata — the best curator being an independent data trust, not a private corporation. But the bogeyman of surveillance capitalism was a convenient target for opponents of Sidewalk Labs, when in fact the onus was always on us to find an appropriate repository for the metadata.
Even with Google long gone, we need to take ownership of governance issues of our own accord. Either way, whether the data is collected by a public repository or corporate player, we need to maintain a sense of proportion about privacy without fetishizing it.
Canadians are obsessive about privacy and secrecy, raising it to exalted status in a reflexive manner that feels more like American individualism than enlightened collectivism. We worry about identity documents, we fuss about fingerprinting and we recoil at contact tracing apps even in a pandemic.
Privacy critics weaponized these flashpoints to fatally weaken the Quayside proposal. Some (but by no means all) urban planners were dismissive of Sidewalk Labs, lampooning its lack of experience in construction and real estate development ( just like the smart money mocked Google and Yahoo a generation ago when the Yellow Pages seemed unbeatable).
The terms of economic engagement have changed with COVID-19 and so Sidewalk Labs has changed course. Its departure is not an irreplaceable loss, but critics have now lost a scapegoat and Toronto must now find its own way.
In mid-pandemic, the pace of innovation is changing even faster — not least the intersection of urban density and data flows. To keep urban density alive amid the novel coronavirus — at a time when mass transit feels too close for comfort, and suburban sprawl looks suddenly safer — the mix of metadata and development is surely a logical synergy.
In a smart city suddenly desperate for social distancing, people will be seeking big-data answers to the little questions that Sidewalk Labs wanted to ask and track in real time: How many people are clustered in the bus shelter? How many pedestrians are crowding the sidewalks? Are the numbers now safe to do the laundry or dump the garbage?
Google spent big money on a failed waterfront experiment that came tumbling down, but gathered valuable data on how to rebuild it elsewhere. Have we learned our own lessons about the intersection of data and development, and the tensions between private interests and public governance?
Sidewalk Labs became the perfect foil for some, the embodiment of evil. Now, if we don’t find our way, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.